| The recent educational reform across the globe has brought much attention to teacher educators and their professional practice. Teacher educators are generally regarded as "linchpins" and "key players" who play a pivotal part in the development of teaching and teacher education. However, to date, teacher educators still remain "an under-researched and poorly understood occupational group" (Murray & Kosnik, 2011, p. 243) in higher education. Particularly in the field of language teacher education, there is a lack of systematic research on how teacher educators engage in various aspects of their professional practice (e.g., teaching, research, supervision, and academic service), what challenges they might encounter, and how they navigate the challenges to facilitate the improvement of language teaching and teacher education. To fill these gaps, the present study, by employing identity as an analytical lens, examines two university-based language teacher educators' professional identities in the contested and ever-shifting contexts of teacher education and higher education in Hong Kong.;Informed by an integrated identity framework comprising the theory of community of practice (Wenger, 1998) and the sociocultural linguistic perspective (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004, 2005, 2010) and employing an ethnographic case study approach, this study explores the two teacher educators' professional experiences and identities for an academic year. The findings reveal a wide range of identities the participants constructed and reconstructed in both practice and discourse, such as "faithful gardener", "senior instructor", "active learner", and "struggling researcher". These identities, on the one hand, derived from their professional engagement in various forms of professional practice (e.g., teaching, research, and practicum supervision) within and across different communities of practice; while on the other, they were also reflected and constructed in the participants' actual language use through three different but interrelated discursive processes, including adequation/distinction, authentication/denaturalization, and authorization/illegitimation. The study adds to our knowledge of the complex and contested nature of teacher educator identity in relation to the ongoing restructuring and reform in higher education. The study also provides some implications for institutional managers and policy makers in terms of how to support language teacher educators' identity development and professional learning for the improvement of language teaching and teacher education. |
